Provocations Sung Genially

On Caetano Veloso’s current tour, his drummer Marcelo Callado has the word “Abraçaço” spelled out on his bass drum in masking tape, in the style of an oppositional, no-budget punk band. The word is a slang intensification of “abraço,” Portuguese for hug, a typical Brazilian signoff in a letter. (It’s also the title of the most recent album by Mr. Veloso, the Brazilian singer-songwriter, the best of three in what could be called, after the fact, a trilogy.) So, “a big hug,” written in the same style that you typically see words like Toxic Threat, or Riot Alarm.

Here and elsewhere, in Mr. Veloso’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday, you could deduce that Mr. Veloso was up to his old tricks. He was twanging and retuning the audience, challenging its expectations of a figure like him: the enlightened witness from the 1960s, the eminent singer of romantic seriousness. His light-voiced geniality is a prize possession, of his and ours, but it’s also a decoy.

The provocations arrive regularly in his recent records: scabrous thoughts in pretty songs, complex bursts of poetic image in easy prosody, prose-poems of real cultural history in music that would seem to want to draw the greater attention to its own sound. One of the striking moments on Thursday came with his recent song “Odeio,” whose lyrics juxtapose mystical visions with daily-grind details: the arrival of an email, the pang of feeling old and ugly. Its serene chorus, sung over tense two-note repetition, is “Odeio voce” (“I hate you”). He sang the line to the audience, smiling, and asked the audience to sing it back to him.

At another point, the band members came to the front of the stage and lined up behind him and extended their arms out to create the image of a many-armed Hindu god, changing their hand gestures; one of those gestures, from Mr. Veloso, was a middle finger.

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Mr. Veloso performed songs new and old with Banda Cê at BAM Opera House on Thursday, but seemed intent on challenging expectations.CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Now 72, Mr. Veloso has been working with this group, Banda Cê, since 2006, through three records and multiple tours. Its members — Mr. Callado, the brilliant guitarist Pedro Sa and the bassist and keyboardist Ricardo Dias Gomes — are all musicians a generation younger. They counteract his eminence. The sound and arrangements of the new songs are small and immediate, skeletal and unsentimental, like a garage band in miniature.

Mr. Veloso seems to crave critical distance, and the band is a new way to help him attain it. With Banda Cê, raw but articulate, he has little risk of coming across as a glib cultural elder statesman. The songs push and soothe and sometimes grate, grounded in old or new sounds, such as the maracatu-like rhythm of “O Império da Lei,” (“The Rule of Law”), inspired by the murders of environmental activists in the Amazon; a kind of long-form, electric-folk minimalism in “Um Comunista,” about the Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella; and variations on bossa nova, his aesthetic resting pulse.

The two-hour set’s references to the past tended toward the complicated and contrarian, too, ambiguous exercises in attraction and withdrawal, irony and rebellion. There were “Baby,” from the late ’60s, and “Você Não Entende Nada” (“You Don’t Understand Anything”) and “De Noite Na Cama” (“By Night in Bed”), from the early ’70s. (During that last one, he unbuttoned his shirt all the way, let it hang open an inch or so, then almost immediately began buttoning it up again.)

The risk, perhaps, of leaning so heavily on ambiguity is that Mr. Veloso is undercutting himself, not allowing himself more access to the beauty of some of his old work; he’s not only a provocateur, but also the writer of more single-purpose songs of love, celebration and memory. But he is concentrating on the new, both for its material and for its double-edged sentiment.

For an encore, he brought out Arto Lindsay, his old friend, collaborator and former producer, who sang a version of Sylvio da Silva’s “Maneiras,” an updated kind of samba, to the atonal tuning of his 12-string guitar. Then, together, Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Veloso sang “9 Out of 10,” written during Mr. Veloso’s period of political exile in London in the early ’70s. It was the set’s only song in English, and as double-edged as it gets. It’s about taking a walk, hearing reggae on the street, and feeling good — with an asterisk.

“I’m alive,” they sang together. And a few lines later, “I know that one day I must die.”

Correction:

A music review last Saturday about Caetano Veloso, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, referred incorrectly to the song “Maneiras,” which was performed as an encore and sung by Arto Lindsay, a friend and former producer of Mr. Veloso. While the band O Rappa has recorded it, it was written by Sylvio da Silva, not by O Rappa.